Everyone gets a little bit antsy on Fridays due to looming weekend excitement. To help us get prepared for the weekend, we have regular all-company meetings where we fill each other in on what’s been going on, share a few laughs, and enjoy some kind of treat. It’s a pretty sweet little tradition.

Of course, such congregations always prove to be great photo opportunities! Here’s a shot of the whole Cooliris team right outside of the brand new signage on our front office door.

Notice all the happy, smiling faces. We’re all pumped for a couple days of freedom, and surely you guys must be too! Have a great weekend, everyone!

PRESS RELEASE

July 16, Palo Alto, CA — Whether you are a publisher, an advertiser, or just a fan of the next-generation Web, you might be interested in today’s announcement of the Cooliris Publisher Network, a brand new way of online advertising that launched in conjunction with the Infiniti G Convertible ad campaign. The campaign is being run across multiple sites including Yahoo! News, Golf.com, the New York Magazine, and Style.com.

Teaming up with OMD, media giant and ag ency of record for Infiniti, Cooliris has created an innovative solution that allows publishers to present rich media advertising on a streaming, infinite 3D Wall of content. Compared to traditional HTML interfaces, the Cooliris solution boasts a 4-fold increase in content selection and up to 12.5 times increase in overall content consumption.

“The partnership between Infiniti and Cooliris has helped bring about a new media paradigm, in which creative and media teams partner with publisher and technology teams to bring about a new, better user experience for the digital space using the most advanced display technology currently available,” said Ben Poore, Vice President, Infiniti. “We are excited that this collaboration creates targeted and engaging solutions for delivering Infiniti’s brand messaging to consumers.”

The Publisher Network leverages the Cooliris Embed Wall, an embeddable Adobe Flash-based version the popular Cooliris browser plugin that provides a faster way to browse photos and videos by displaying content on an infinitely scrollable 3D Wall. Premium publishers can now post the Cooliris experience directly into their websites, drive more views and engagement of their content, while also gaining supplemental revenue opportunities with well-known brands.

OMD accelerates the adoption of this cutting-edge technology among key publishers with its Infiniti campaign, where their ads are displayed unobtrusively across a block of up to ninestunning image tiles within the Cooliris 3D Wall embedded across multiple publisher sites and the Cooliris browser application.

Publishers such as the Wall Street Journal website have used the Embed Wall to showcase large galleries of photos. The Regis & Kelly website has also leveraged this technology to run contests and programs. Now, through participation in the Cooliris Publisher Network, publishers are combining the interactivity of a 3D Wall of their media content with brand advertising.

Over 8000 websites now use the Cooliris Embed Wall.  Although only publishers and brands participating in the Cooliris Publisher Network are able to place ads in the Embed Wall, owners of any website, big or small, can still embed the Cooliris 3D Wall (without advertising) on their site by visiting http://developer.cooliris.com. 

We can all be a little lazy sometimes. We can be so lethargic, in fact, that we refuse to expend the energy to lift our hand and guide it to the mouse while using the computer. For this very reason, we have implemented a few new keyboard shortcuts in the newest version of Cooliris.

HIDING THE MENUS

Say you want to use Cooliris to make an in-class presentation. Or maybe you’re about to watch your favorite episode of Scrubs on Cooliris. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to hide the potentially distracting menu along with the search bar and scroll bar? Well, now you can! Just hit Alt-Escape on your Mac or F8 on your PC and they’re outta there. But please don’t fret and think you’ve lost the menus forever – you can easily make them reappear by hitting the exact same keys again.

Pretend you’re looking at a picture of your favorite Tour de France cyclist. You want to visit the actual site, but don’t want to have to reopen Cooliris and go back to the same photo once you’re done looking at the other page. Simple solution: open the other web page in a new tab by holding Command (Control on PC’s) and clicking on the Go to Webpage icon in the bottom right corner of the image you’ve selected. You’ll still have Cooliris open in your first tab when you’re ready to go back to browsing.

ZOOMING

Of course, we’ve created these new shortcuts in addition to the preexisting zooming shortcut. You can still zoom in and out on both platforms by holding down Control and pressing the up and down arrows.

We hope these shortcuts help make your Cooliris experience even easier, even in the most intense bouts of laziness. But please keep in mind that any preexisting shortcuts on your computer may override those of Cooliris, so you may have to switch ˜em around. Happy browsing, and be sure to tell us about any other helpful shortcuts we should implement!

One of the most rewarding things about working on an application like Cooliris is watching it grow and improve. We paid especially close attention to user suggestions to sweeten up the user interface in Cooliris v. 1.11, our newest release, making it much more versatile and easier to use.

The biggest change is our fitting the Cooliris 3D Wall directly into your browser tab instead of filling your entire screen. This allows you to quickly jump among tabs, or go back and forth between Cooliris and other programs you have running (e-mail, iTunes, etc.). You can also assemble a playlist of music videos in your Favorites tab and keep the music playing in the background as you continue your daily browsing activities.

What’s more, the tab feature lets you enjoy multiple instances of Cooliris running at once. For example, you can use one tab of Cooliris to check out pictures of your favorite actor, and then another to watch the trailer of his upcoming movie.

Small changes make a big difference. We’ve changed the design of the scroll bar to make it easier to locate and use. In our previous version of Cooliris, the scroll bar completely eluded users because it didn’t look like a scroll bar (though I think it was quite slick and modern looking). As a result, some users never got the chance to experience the full glory of scrolling the 3D Wall. Imagine that! For those who prefer clicking and dragging to a scroll bar, we’ve added a grab icon to indicate that the 3D Wall is indeed scrollable that way, too.

To check out tutorials and videos on how to make the most of your Cooliris experience, just click the question mark icon to see our brand-new Help section.

Of course, in making these improvements we certainly haven’t lost sight of the great features Cooliris already has. You can still check out all your content in slideshow mode, maximize the window to immerse yourself in your media, and search media providers, channel surf TV episodes and news, and launch directly from Facebook, YouTube, Google Images, and more.

We love to know what you guys think! So, please send us any feedback you have.

Hello there!

My name is Mark and I’m an intern here at Cooliris. I’ll be posting regularly to discuss Cooliris and the many things beyond it. I hope to make our blog not only an interesting place to learn more about Cooliris, but also a community page where we can share our thoughts on the things going on in the world, both technological and otherwise. We would love to hear from you, no matter the topic!

Well, it appears that my acquisition of blog privileges is quite timely “ there have been some interesting things afoot at Cooliris, particularly surrounding our new 1.11 release. If you’ve had a chance to poke around in 1.11, you’ll notice that one of the coolest new features is the ability to share your favorite 3D Walls through URL’s.

Sharing URL’s makes it infinitely easier to share awesome walls of content with your friends and family. You can simply bring up the desired 3D Wall in your web browser, copy the above URL, and paste it wherever you want. You can also share specific content within a Wall by clicking on a specific item and then copying and pasting the URL. Easy? Oh yeah.

There are all sorts of good places to post a 3D Wall URL. Try tossing one up as your Facebook status, posting one in your favorite forum, or tweeting it on your Twitter account.

Of course, these URL’s are made even more useful by the fact that Cooliris is compatible with so many popular sites. For example, if one of your buddies is looking to buy a car, send him a 3D Wall of some sleek-looking BMW’s, and perhaps a Wall of crazy techno CD’s from Amazon to make up his ride’s soundtrack. Heck, send him a 3D Wall of YouTube clips from The Fast and the Furious to get him pumped up to drive that baby! The possibilities are endless.

Sharing content through URL’s can be used in a broader, more professional sense as well. Consider a budding photographer trying to publicize her Flickr photos. What better way to get her shots out there than with a 3D Wall URL? Or think of a young webmaster who has just enabled his website with Cooliris. How sweet would it be to share things from his very own site with the click of a button? Really sweet.

But the URL feature doesn’t always have to be used for sharing. You can use it to bookmark any 3D Wall of your choosing so you can instantly come back to it with the click of a button. Just bookmark the URL of your 3D Wall and all the content will be a click away when you’re ready for ˜em.

There is so much to explore and share on the internet “ sharing 3D Wall URL’s makes it much easier and more fun to do both! If you haven’t gotten a chance to try it yet, definitely check it out and bombard your friends with 3D Walls of some awesome stuff. Better yet, bombard us with some of your favorite 3D Walls – maybe photos from your 4th of July weekend, or perhaps your favorite patriotic music video. And, as always, please let us know what you think!